USPTO issues patent for fraudulent stem cell procedure

Last weekend, The New York Timesdiscovered that the US Patent Office had issued a patent for a procedure to generate human stem cells. This, by itself, isn't especially surprising. What is surprising is the recipient: Hwang Woo-suk, the Korean researcher who is widely considered to have faked his data in the paper that claimed derivation of the first cloned human stem cells.

Astonishingly, the patent was for the work that's now regarded by almost everyone other than Hwang as being fraudulent.

The award came despite the fact that the USPTO originally had decided not to award the patent because the patent application did not contain a proper description of the work. A signed affidavit from Hwang himself was apparently all that was needed to clear this hurdle and allow the patent to go forward.

In general, patent applications are meant to operate on an honors system: applicants don't have to verify their claims because, as part of the patent process, they make their developments public, which will allow anyone else to verify them. If any procedure covered by the patent doesn't work, then there's nothing to enforce, and nobody's going to successfully violate it anyway.

However, it's also easy to view this as an indication that the patent office is prone to issuing patents for things they have not vetted carefully. The research papers in which the work was described are cited in the patent, and both are now clearly marked as retracted (as you can see from the bright red warning at the top of one). There's also the matter of the two-year prison term that Hwang was sentenced to, which isn't hard to find out about—it's in the opening paragraphs of his Wikipedia entry.

And there are reasons to think the USPTO should be doing this sort of research. Even if the patent is ultimately unenforceable, it still might be extremely expensive to demonstrate that. And, there seems to be a very real chance that Hwang will go after anyone who strays close to his "procedures"—a recent profile indicates Hwang is using a private animal cloning company to try to mount a comeback in his native Korea.